A cross-cultural Bible?

The ceaseless ebb and flow of human culture and the unchanging, eternal word of God...they don't exactly seem like natural bedfellows. But CMS missionary Andrew Buchanan argues that when we open our Bibles, we must take culture seriously - and, in fact, culture can bring to light the riches of God's word.

During my year of Indonesian language study in the city of Bandung, on the island of Java, I made friends with a single Indonesian Christian man who was a successful professional. He shared with me about his former girlfriend: how, though they liked each other, she had broken up with him. Why? Because her parents didn't like him.

I was surprised at this. From an Australian perspective, they were clearly old enough to be making their own choices. In most places in Indonesia young people do choose their partner, but having the blessing of one's parents on a proposed union is so important that few will proceed without it.

The following year I was settling in Toraja and leading some student Bible studies using material called 'Beginning the New Life'. This material was written by Indonesian staff of the Perkantas student movement, the IFES affiliate in Indonesia. Perkantas is one of the great signs of hope for the church in Indonesia, but I was puzzled by the last study in the series. It broached the important topic of choosing a suitable marriage partner, and it said lots of useful things about looking for godliness in a prospective husband or wife rather than looks or wealth. But it said nothing about the role of parents - even though for Indonesian Christians there can be a real tension between honouring one's parents and loving Jesus more than family. This tension becomes acute in instances when a godly prospective spouse is rejected by the parents of their suitor for reasons unrelated to faith, such as ethnic group or wealth.

How could this tension be ignored? I suspect that the staff who wrote these studies studied at an evangelical college in America, and used IVP (InterVarsity Press) studies as a model. It was, in the memorable image of Asian theologian Hwa Yung, an example of 'banana theology'. Though it was yellow (Asian) on the outside - it was, after all, written in Indonesian - it was white (Western) on the inside. Hwa Yung contrasts banana theology with 'mango theology', mangoes being yellow through and through.¹

The problem with bananas

This is a simple example of the issue of contextualisation as it applies to understanding the Bible in a cross-cultural situation. Even though the books of the Bible were written by and for people in very different contexts to ours, we in Australia have a multitude of resources to help us grasp and apply the Bible from within our own context. Meanwhile, Indonesians have only (a subset of) these same Western-oriented resources - despite the fact that the sociocultural  landscape of Indonesia is in many ways far removed from our own.

This doesn't make these resources useless, of course. Culture in all its variation expresses a common humanity, and the Bible deals with fundamental issues common to all cultures, in particular our relationship with the unchanging God, and the news of what he has done in history for our salvation. Using Bible resources developed in contexts foreign to your own is like listening to a poor sermon - a sermon which deals with the passage at hand, but not in a way that you can make sense of.

Let me take an example in reverse. I once gave an Easter sermon from Colossians 2:6-15 in an area near Toraja. I preached that we don't need to be afraid of local spirits and transgressing local taboos, because Jesus is stronger than any of those forces (vv.9-10), and our spiritual circumcision which marks us as Christ's will be recognised by any local powers (vv.11-12). Rather, the real taboo is breaking God's command, and our sin is the only weapon the devil has - but even this has been removed by Christ on the cross (vv.13-15).

This sermon had some impact there; at the very least, the mother of one student rebuked her husband for sacrificing a chicken when he wanted to put an extension on the house, to pacify any local spirits who might be upset by the change. But if you heard this presented as a serious sermon in Australia, you'd be more likely to want to change the preacher than change your own life!

You would want to change the preacher because you already have a clear conception of what culturally appropriate teaching looks like in your context. But if all you ever heard or read about the Bible stemmed from a foreign context, and a culturally (and economically) dominant foreign context at that, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the problem lay with you or with the Bible, not with the Western teaching or resources.

This leaves you with an unfortunate choice. If you decide that the problem lies with you, you may well choose to stay faithful to the Bible even though its message isn't clear to you. But alternatively, you may see this kind of adherence to the Bible as a formal orthodoxy which doesn't connect with local reality, and conclude that the problem lies with the Bible. You may decide that the Bible really is more 'Western' than Asian and, therefore, needs to be 'corrected'  in order to be truly relevant to the Asian scene. The choice between out-of-touch orthodoxy and unfaithful relevance is the unfortunate consequence of a lack of culturally attuned local resources. All too often, the result is that significant aspects of the gospel message get sidelined or discarded.

Taking culture seriously

Last year, I began working towards a PhD jointly supervised by the University of Sydney and Moore Theological College . My PhD research is endeavouring to show how biblical interpretation that treats the Bible as fundamental and normative can also take local culture (in this case, Torajan culture) with complete seriousness.

As a test case I've chosen Hebrews 8-10, which uses the sacrificial system of Leviticus to explain the meaning of Christ's death. My focus is not on application of the text, which is obviously contextual, but on the process of exegesis, where we seek to make sense of the text on its own terms. An important observation of contextualisation theory is that the 'we' who makes sense of the text is an enculturated 'we'. Bible scholars don't have an abstract mathematical language in which to state the meaning of a text, which then remains to be applied to varying cultures. Instead, we are thinking from within a context right from reading the first Greek or Hebrew word of the passage we are studying.

This doesn't mean that we are imprisoned by our culture. Our brains have a wonderful capacity to grasp new things; indeed, almost everything we know was foreign to us at some stage in our lives. The Bible speaks to this human adaptability, in that parts of the Bible that are strange and new at first sight are illuminated elsewhere.

For example, Hebrews 9:11-12 presents the strange picture of Christ as high priest entering through a heavenly tent into the Holy Place bearing his own blood, and thereby obtaining eternal redemption. The roots of this are found in the Day of Atonement ceremony in Leviticus 16, summarised in Hebrews 9:7, where the high priest enters once a year into that part of the tabernacle structure which symbolises God's presence, the inner tent (see Hebrews 9:5 and Exodus 25:22). Leviticus 16 narrates a sequence of events which we can follow without ever having seen an animal sacrifice in real life, because we have experienced the elements that make it up: tents, animals, humans, blood. Having been told that the earthly tabernacle is a copy of the heavenly (Hebrews 8:2, 5), we can grasp that the Holy Place of verse 12 refers to God's actual presence, and that Jesus' blood is connected with atonement, dealing with the problem of sin (e.g., Hebrews 8:8-9).

Transcending cultural limits

However, though the Bible helps us to overcome the barrier of our cultural distance, culture does limit us. In this case, we Westerners have trouble when it comes to making something of the concept of sacrifice. By contrast, many in the more traditional parts of Toraja still make animal sacrifices. I was told a story once of a village where a child was sick and, after exhausting other possibilities such as a doctor, the village concluded that there must have been a transgression of some kind. On investigation, it turned out that a couple in the village was committing adultery. The couple provided a water buffalo, which was burnt whole. As soon as the animal went up in flames, the child got up and was better. In the understanding of the people in the village (to the extent that I have grasped it), the transgression caused disruption in the 'moral order' of the village, and the public outing of the offence, along with the sacrifice, 'combed out' this disruption.²

This conception is not so far from what we find in Leviticus. The various Old Testament regulations about what makes a person unclean provide a picture of the fact that God has made an ordered world, as we see in Genesis 1. People become unclean because they do things like touch a corpse (Leviticus 5:2), get a skin disease that makes them look like a corpse (Numbers 12:10, 13), or lose the life-giving fluids of blood or semen (Leviticus 15:32-33). We find such regulations puzzling because these are clearly not always voluntary actions. However, the regulations function symbolically to mark off death from the life that God's creation order is intended to support, and so these actions symbolise disorder that is wider than intentional sin. Sacrifices, in turn, serve to cover over or cleanse this disorder, disorder which, like the transgressions in Toraja, is understood to affect the whole community (Leviticus 16:17). 

So, the letter of Hebrews is saying to its Jewish readers that what those sacrifices did on a recurring basis, Jesus' sacrifice has done once for all time. The blood of Jesus cleanses the individual worshipper so that he or she can serve God (Hebrews 9:14), and it cleanses the inner sanctuary so that God can continue to dwell with his people (Hebrews 9:23). In other (Torajan) words, Jesus' sacrifice 'combs out' the disruption caused by sin. The traditional Torajan may be better equipped to grasp this point than we are - provided that they aren't limited to accessing this passage through our Western eyes.

This example illustrates that in order to treat the Bible as normative not only can we take culture seriously, but we actually need to. Culture is the vantage point from which we initially enter the world of the Bible. Having entered its world, the Bible in turn exercises its authority by radically reshaping and expanding our cultural understandings, particularly through our participation in God's community, the church. In the complex situation of churches planted by missionaries from a very different culture, ignoring the question of culture means implicitly giving priority to Western culture. Among other things this means that local cultural resources for understanding the text are neglected.

This is not just a loss for the local community in question. Given that people from every nation will worship God in the new creation, it makes sense to expect that our understanding of the Bible will be enriched by truly contextual exegesis within different cultures.

The spiritual riches of contextualisation

So, how might an understanding of Hebrews that is relevant for Toraja enrich our understanding? Hebrews 9 speaks of Jesus blood ' cleansing' our consciences (verse 14) and cleansing the heavenly sanctuary (verse 23). Since in Western culture we tend to think of moral failure as deliberate individual transgressions against moral principles (God's revealed will for Christians), we tend to understand this as poetic language for justification. Being cleansed is equated with being declared not guilty.

But a sense of being 'dirty' is wider than a sense of guilt. A victim of abuse has not committed a willful sin, and yet often feels a strong sense of being defiled. This sense accurately reflects being a participant, albeit unwilling, in a situation involving violation of God's creation order that was intended to bring life. In a similar way, we Australians feel discomfort at our participation - as individuals and as a church - in the structures of Australian society that are built on the dispossession of the original inhabitants of this land. Not to mention our dependence on socioeconomic systems that are intrinsically linked to continued low standards of living in other parts of the world, and the ongoing degradation of the environment. We don' t intend any of these things, yet as beneficiaries we stand implicated in them.

I'd suggest that these examples are modern equivalents of the corporate or unintentional transgressions in Leviticus that we find puzzling - or at least of what those transgressions symbolised, that is, disruption of God's good order. It is interesting, then, that Hebrews 9 focuses on "unintentional sins" when describing the sacrifices of the High Priest that Jesus fulfills (Hebrews 9:7, 12). Jesus' blood cleanses us from all the impurity that stems from being a part of the moral chaos of our world, not just from those parts where we are clearly and individually responsible.  

Contextualisation ultimately affirms that God' s interest is wider than just the Western church. The Bible is as relevant for Torajans as it is for Australians, and a contextual approach will enable Torajan culture to bring to light aspects of the richness of the Bible's meaning that are obscure for us. This will not only strengthen the Torajan church by making the message of the gospel clearer. It will also greatly benefit the wider church.

Andrew Buchanan will be returning to Indonesia later this year to continue his PhD studies at the Church of Toraja's Institute of Theology. He hopes that his research will help him to better train local church leaders at the Institute and to support leaders of evangelism movements in Toraja. If you'd like to receive Andrew's prayer letters, you can subscribe to his mailing list here.